MISSIONARY REPORT

Hankow, on the middle Yangtze, was a city of refuge last week. Into it from newly abandoned mission stations in Honan and. northern Hupeh provinces--by rail, truck, mule cart and often on foot--trekked American missionaries. They felt unable any longer to live and work in an area where Chinese Communists now marched almost at will. Three missionaries had been shot to death by "bandits" who hauled them from a bus shouting: "You are Americans, and Americans must die!" They were Martha Anderson of Minneapolis, Esther Nordlund of Chicago, and Dr. Alexis Berg of Finland, all attached to an Evangelical Covenant Mission in Hupeh. Others, who reached Hankow, told their stories quietly, without rancor.

"I Reminded Them . . ." The Seventh Day Adventists at Yencheng left their mission and 80-bed hospital a week before Christmas. Normally, Hankow is only a day's rail journey south. It took them--six Americans and 28 Chinese led by Elder Merritt C. Warren of California--three weeks.

The Adventists' train came to a dead halt after the first few miles. Communist troops of General Chen Yi questioned them, bragged that the next train would not leave for two years. When Nationalist forces appeared, the Reds withdrew. The Warren party hired pushcarts and continued south. Behind them they heard the gunfire of new attacks, but twice each day they paused for prayer.

One night, while the party rested in the walled town of Chioshan, Communists attacked it. Nationalist defenders placed their ammunition dump next to the missionaries' quarters. When shells began to fall, the missionaries took cover in the basement, and prayed again. Nationalist reinforcements arrived, and the Communists withdrew.

Elder Warren helped tend some of the wounded. Said he: "Those Reds are plucky. ... I boiled water and got food for them. I also reminded them that when they found our chapels they usually destroyed them. . . ." At Hankow the missionaries got word of their hospital back in Yencheng: it had been burned.

"Thousands of Whips." The city of Junan (60,000 pop.) had a good wall, recalled the Rev. Herbert Loddigs, of St. Albans, L.I., who worked in the Evangelical Lutheran mission there until a month ago. "The people had a lot of confidence in their wall." A Communist attack was not seriously expected. But two nights before Christmas the city gong sounded a loud warning.

Communist guns hammered away at Junan's good wall for 23 hours. Then the southeast gates gave way, and Communist troops surged into Junan over the bodies of their dead--machine guns, Loddigs recalled, cracking "like thousands of whips."

The Communists gave instructions about looting to Junan's lao pai hsing (common people). Their notice said: "When you want to rob the rich, you must not do it as you please. You must take a soldier with you."

"Ultimately You'll Leave." The Lutheran mission church at Hsuchang had originally been a stable. When Chen Yi's troops took Hsuchang for awhile last month they turned it back into a stable. "Instead of pews," said 30-year-old Pastor Anders B. Hansen last week, "there were stalls. . . . Light poured in through a mortar hole in the ceiling, and horses stirred in the stalls. ... It looked like the Christmas scene turned upside down."

Mission work at Hsuchang had been considerably hampered by the Communist occupation, but the missionaries considered that the Reds treated them "very decently." One remembered a young Communist officer who had scolded a soldier for spitting on the mission floor. Americans did not spit on the floor, he said; Communists would have to learn that, too. To the missionary the officer said: "Christianity is not solving China's problems. You can stay around if you want, but ultimately you'll leave."

"With Wallace . . ." Treatment of missionaries and mission property by the Reds seemed to depend on the whims or decisions of individual officers. In the city of Tsaoyang, mild-mannered young Missionary .Philip Werdal, of Bellingham, Wash., underwent repeated interrogation from 27-year-old Communist Colonel Wong, graduate of Nanking University, an American-supported mission school. Wong looked at Werdal's soft hands, then at his own calloused ones. He said he was a Communist because he wanted, some day, to have soft hands.

"With Wallace as your President," intoned the up-to-the-minute young Communist, "we could have peace. He represents your lao pai hsing. With Truman and the rest there can be no peace." After eight days of this, he ordered the missionaries to leave Tsaoyang. Hard-handed Wong kept some souvenirs: two radios, Pastor Werdal's Parker "51," and a silk sleeping bag belonging to an elderly woman missionary.

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